The Falling Empires Saga (The Complete Series, Books 1-4), page 98
Andrei kept his smile for his entire ride around the back of the army. He didn’t relish the fight, like he knew a lot of Kurakin did.
Instead, Andrei now thought of his home. Of his family.
This skirmish within this small Erlonian town would be the next step to getting back to them. It would preclude a battle as the Erlonian army tried to cross the river to safety. The Kurakin would stop them, attack them at their most vulnerable.
Andrei would serve his purpose in Duroc’s grand plan and defeat the last marshal. And then the Scythe commander would finally be able to return home to see his family. He would be allowed to march south once again and hold his wife tight and hug his children and be done with war at last.
That feeling lifted his heart as he joined his Scythes on the northern flank of the march. He raised his sword out in front of him and the regiment moved off at a gallop. His warriors cried out behind him and the wolverines joined in with roars of their own.
They were off. They ate up the distance over the flat plains beyond the grove of trees.
The town loomed in the distance, already smoldering. The next attack began in a rush.
Infantry streamed forward. There was no stopping to reorganize for the next attack. The formations joined the fray when they arrived and threw themselves towards the houses.
Andrei cut his wolverines down the side of the main attack. The northern edge of the town was just ahead.
Andrei angled towards the right of the Erlonian line. The enemy cannons opened up and sent shells into the infantry on his flank. It was only a few guns, not enough artillery to effectively hold the town.
The Kurakin would crush them.
The enemy gave a valiant effort and sent a musket volley against the attackers. Andrei would expect nothing less from soldiers of Erlon. But there was no stopping the Kurakin attack now.
The wolverines roared as they churned through the last bits of dirt between them and the enemy. Andrei led from the front and burst through the musket smoke to bring his sword down on the first line of Erlonians.
Claws and swords met bayonets. The Scythes crashed into the wall of defenders.
The next fight for the end of this war had begun.
Lodi
Lodi led the cavalry column on a wide arc across the Erlonian plain. They galloped up from the south, around the main push from the Kurakin and around behind the end of the Horde’s long marching line.
There were pockets of trees that Lodi used to hide their approach, but this land was mostly farmland and wide stretches of open and flat terrain. The Lakmian would have to hope the Kurakin weren’t actively scouting this far behind the front lines.
And that they weren’t expecting such a rash attack so far away from the main front.
The first half of the journey proved lucky and no Kurakin appeared on the horizon. Lodi thought he could make out a distant haze of dust from the marching enemy to the north, but he couldn’t be sure. He chose not to focus on the Horde just yet. Instead, he only needed to get his men into position.
The Lakmian cavalry regiments carried long spears dangling forward or held tall and upright. General Desaix had a similar column of Erlonians mirroring their route behind the enemy, farther to the west.
The plan of attack was simple, but very dangerous.
The two cavalry groups would converge on the back of the Kurakin line and break apart any rearguard present. They would then look to free the Brunian prisoners, wherever they were held, and march them south to the safety of a specified stretch of woods.
The hope was that the quick strike from the cavalry would allow the group to get in and out before the Kurakin could adjust. The enemy should be focused on the front of their column and not expecting such an attack from the rear.
Lodi was happy Lauriston had agreed to the initial idea and built it out into such a good strategy. But now that he was here and felt how exposed his horses were with the open land and the entire enemy army just to the north, the Lakmian couldn’t help but feel fear.
He focused on his breathing. He felt the rumble of his horse’s hooves below him and the focus of the beast as it enjoyed the rushing gallop. This calmed the Lakmian a bit, but not all the way.
Lodi let out a long breath and looked back to the north. The dust cloud was clearer now and was directly on their right flank. It was almost time; they were almost there.
Lodi would trust Desaix to turn the other column at the appropriate time. That time was now.
The Lakmian general raised a hand to signal his men. After waiting the appropriate few moments for the motion to be passed back to the rear, Lodi angled right and cut his men towards the hazy horizon in the north.
They were almost there. Lodi now had his column pointed towards the rear of the Horde army and the prisoners. The long spears fell forward, reaching out and eager to run through some Kurakin soldiers. The raid was on. Death galloped towards the enemy.
Lauriston
The world was only smoke and explosions. Men lay in the mud, screaming in agony. Black coats whipped out of the haze at the edge of the battle. The Horde clashed with the blue of the Erlonian Guard.
Lauriston strained to hold the men together.
The town of Verdan’s defenses took the full force of the Kurakin attack. The Erlonians bent back from the pressure, but they didn’t break. Marshal Lauriston watched more and more Hordesmen pour into the streets and attack his men. He stepped forward and joined the fighting, standing side by side with his guardsmen.
The army needed more time. They couldn’t break yet. They had to keep the enemy army occupied long enough for Lodi and Desaix to get the Brunian prisoners in the west to safety.
Lauriston pulled back and ran along the line of houses that now served as the army’s defensive wall. Everywhere he looked, there were injured Erlonians. Some were still fighting; others were slumped against walls and barely clung to life.
Lauriston passed one soldier who struggled to keep his musket high enough to fire. The man was prone and leaning against a crumbling wall. Lauriston stopped and pulled the man away from the line. He yelled for another soldier to fill the gap as he lifted the man up to a standing position.
The injured soldier’s eyes could barely focus on his commanding officer and Lauriston made his decision quickly. He pulled the man’s arm over his own shoulder and dragged him towards the back lines.
A pair of soldiers soon rushed over to the marshal and took the injured man from him. The soldier would be ferried to the rear, where carts were waiting to pull the wounded south towards the main army.
As Lauriston turned around to launch himself back into the front lines of battle, he felt a sudden and strong desire to sound the retreat. His army was clearly outmatched and outnumbered. It wouldn’t be possible to hold this position for much longer.
But Lodi and Desaix needed more time. Quatre and Elisa wouldn’t be across into Lakmia yet.
Lauriston forced his feet to move back towards the front lines. There was no doubting his plan anymore. There could be only positive action. His brave soldiers were hurt all around him, and yet they still fought on.
Lauriston drew his pistol and resumed his path down the back of the houses. Their marshal would fight with his warriors.
His men used the various structures as cover, as the enemy did on the other side.
The rush of the first attack was over. The enemy’s momentum had miraculously stagnated, but there was more to come.
As Lauriston assessed the enemy positions, Horde cannons ripped into the Erlonians.
The guns were at close range and sounded like thunderclaps. The house directly in front of Lauriston exploded backwards in a rush of wood and stone and fire.
Erlonians were thrown in all directions. Lauriston moved forward, an arm up to shield his face from the smoke and debris. When the scene cleared, the position was swarming with Hordesmen.
Lauriston fired his pistol at the closest enemy. He yelled for his men to form up and felt the soldiers rally to him immediately.
He drew his sword, the metal gleaming in the sunlight even through the haze of battle.
This is rash, Lauriston thought to himself. A marshal didn’t fight on the front lines. The action he was about to take went against all his training and experience.
But this wasn’t a normal fight, nor a normal war. Circumstances were dire. They couldn’t afford to have the line break apart.
Marshal Lauriston threw himself forward and his war cry was echoed behind him as the Erlonians followed.
“Onward!”
“Onward, Erlon!”
The two sides slammed into each other in the rubble of the destroyed home.
The first enemies were large axmen, their weapons swinging in great arcs to cleave the defenders in two. They were not an issue for Lauriston’s men.
The marshal ducked under the first strike to come his way and stabbed up into the gut of the Kurakin. The ferocious enemy died just like any other soldier. Lauriston didn’t stop to watch him fall.
He slashed through two more axmen and ended up on the other side of the enemy regiment, where he found a brief opening in the battle line. He sheathed his sword and reloaded his pistol. His soldiers took down the other axmen on either side of him as more Kurakin climbed through the rubble of the houses just beyond.
Lauriston’s hands worked quickly. He didn’t fumble or miss a movement. The skills of a lifelong warrior never left him. In only a few breaths he had a fully loaded pistol again.
The lead Kurakin was the unlucky soul who took the marshal’s bullet in the forehead.
Lauriston’s sword was back out, its gleam tinted red from the blood of previous enemies. More of the color from the Kurakin side would soon be added.
Horde infantry climbed through the last of the rubble of the destroyed houses. Lauriston’s warriors met them, sword to sword. The marshal pushed away one Hordesman’s thrust and parried the strike from another. He cut through the first soldier and swung quickly at the second, but this enemy parried.
Erlonian reserves appeared on the other side of the gap and surrounded the Kurakin. The attack was pushed back and Lauriston’s opponent felt the momentum shift and made the mistake of glancing towards the flank. The marshal didn’t let the lapse go to waste.
He knocked the enemy’s sword up and out of position with a quick strike before slicing across the exposed stomach. No other blow was needed. Lauriston simply pushed the Kurakin to the side and stepped around his crumbling body.
The other Hordesmen were either dying or already falling back. The Erlonian line was reformed. Up and down the allied defenses there were now gaps being plugged.
Lauriston only had one group of reserves remaining, and most of them had just committed themselves to defend this position. That meant his army was on their last legs, even as the defenses stabilized for the moment.
Lauriston tried to think on how long it’d been since the first skirmish. It felt like days. He took a quick glance up at the sun. It was barely midday.
The rush of battle always made time move in strange ways.
Lauriston would try and hold against the next Kurakin push, but that would be the last his soldiers could handle. If that didn’t give enough time to his allies, then Lodi and Desaix would be on their own.
The marshal turned from the rubble of the house and moved back towards the center of the line. The Kurakin sent another artillery volley against the houses and more stone crumbled. The next wave of Kurakin infantry would soon follow.
Lauriston picked up to a run, yelling and pointing out places along the line. He had to rally the men to hold one more time. They’d lost a lot of men already, but Lauriston knew he could count on these brave men to continue fighting no matter what came through the smoke at them.
More Kurakin enemies roared into the town and the Erlonians stood to meet them. They sent a musket volley into the middle of the Horde and then drew their swords or leveled their bayonets. Lauriston joined his warriors, his sword covered in enemy blood and raised high above his head as he threw himself back into the battle.
Chapter 23
The release of stress after a well-executed plan is a wonderful feeling.
From Emperor Gerald Lannes’s personal journal
Year 1108 Post-Abandonment, one day after the Battle of Lobau
Elisa
Elisa, along with the soldiers around her, trudged along the road heading south and wallowed in guilt. Marshal Lauriston and his men were sacrificing their own safety in order for the rest of the army to get across the Kal River into Lakmia. It felt wrong, even for a princess of Erlon, to be running in the opposite direction and not be helping to fight the Kurakin directly.
But General Quatre kept the men focused. It helped that they were too far away to hear the battle rumbling behind them. The march kept moving, and on the second day after splitting with Lauriston’s division, they sighted Bordin.
It was a small town on the edge of the Erlonian plains. On the other side of the waterway might have been another world. Where Elisa had been traveling on flat terrain for what felt like months, the ground now broke into rolling and rocky hills before becoming the great Antres Mountains on the horizon to the south.
It’s perfect defensive ground.
Right after Elisa had such a thought, she realized it was exactly how her father would want her to think. He would look at the military value of the land first.
Elisa smiled at the thought. It seemed that spending so much time with the army was having an effect on her. She became more and more like her father with each day.
She looked over the hills and tried to see what lay beyond them in the east, but the heights blocked her view. The woods of Lakmia, where the emperor currently marched with an army of Brunians, waited on the other side.
She was closer to her father now than she’d been since the last time the emperor was in Plancenoit. It felt like a lifetime ago. Elisa had been a little girl back then, if not in age at least in maturity and knowledge of the world.
She’d now seen a lot of the world. She’d seen what the Continent’s wars had to offer, what her father had marched off to wage so many times during her childhood.
Would he recognize her? Would things between them be the same as before?
Elisa’s eyes began to well up and she quickly dropped the questions from her mind. She couldn’t be seen crying in front of the other soldiers; she couldn’t show that weakness on the eve of battle.
There was plenty of work to do to get the men across the river. Elisa chose to focus on leading her unit and helping Quatre oversee the crossing as a distraction. She would come back to thoughts on her father later.
But there was another persistent topic raging across her thoughts. The image of Chaos kept appearing in her mind.
The task of facing him fell to Elisa alone; no one else around her could help her.
She and the guide had talked through Elisa’s proposed plan to draw Chaos out and trap him. The vision didn’t seem completely confident in her idea, but that did nothing to dampen Elisa’s resolve to execute it.
It was up to her to do something to stop the evil god marching with the Kurakin. Chaos had been dormant for the fights since the battle for the Vendome road, but Elisa knew he was still out there.
He was hunting her. And he would strike during the next battle.
Elisa knew it was an insane thought, but a part of her kept wondering if this entire invasion by the Kurakin was only to get Chaos to Elisa. The Kurakin wanted power; they wanted more influence on the mainland of the Continent.
But there were still open questions around the invasion that Elisa couldn’t shake. She’d heard Lauriston and the other leaders voice them as well.
Why were the Kurakin pushing so aggressively north? Why stretch themselves so thin?
The Horde kept winning and the Erlonians kept retreating. But there was something more to this campaign. A motive no one else was seeing. Something Elisa’s mind couldn’t quite put together.
It’s not because of you, she told herself over and over.
Chaos wanted her, that much was true. But that was separate from the Kurakin betrayal of the former Coalition. Something else pushed the Kurakin Horde after the army of Erlon.
The guide wasn’t much help with the questions either. He assisted Elisa with her plan but seemed distracted and often appeared aloof when he showed up to talk with her, as if he’d just woken up from a very strange dream.
There was very little time for Elisa to dwell on the mysteries of the world, though. She’d told herself it was now time for action.
No more questions. No more retreating.
No more wasting time and avoiding her fate.
It was time to turn and face her enemy. The next great battle for Erlon was almost here. If Lauriston’s plan worked, the fight would happen on the rocky hills just across the river in Lakmia. Elisa’s plan against Chaos would have to be executed first to ensure the army was protected.
She was ready.
Or as ready as she could be.
As she helped Quatre begin organizing the army to cross the bridge from Erlon into Lakmia, she thought on her choices and her plan of attack.
Her resolve was still strong. But the time was almost here to see if she was making the right choice.
Just like Lauriston sticking to his strategy and taking bold action against the Kurakin Horde, Elisa would strike out first. Both sides of the fight for Erlon would see if victory waited on the other end of their plans.
Lauriston
Verdan was lost. Lauriston hated running from the enemy, even if it was part of the plan.
